Recently I decided I would connect my external hard-drive to a PC in my house so that I could access my music over the network as opposed to connecting it to my Macbook everytime I wanted to access music or movies. Lucky for me it’s incredibly easy to share files over the network between Windows and OS X:

Share a folder or a drive in Windows by right clicking > Properties > Sharing > Check Share Folder

On the Mac, open up Finder and click on Go > Connect to Server…

Enter smb://<your windows pc hostname>

Now you can connect to any shared folder on your Windows machine, but how do we make sure it stays mounted? Simply go to Apple > System Preferences > Accounts > Logon Items > Add the shared volume

That was painless. For all tech readers this isn’t because Mac’s rule, its because of the Samba protocol which enables you to network different operating systems. Samba is now a part of Apple, but lets not forget its open-source roots.

I recently picked up an iPhone. It’s sexy. However, I’m definitely not going to pay money to create a ringtone out of a song that I already own – sorry Apple, RIAA, AT&T, your mom thats not going to cut it. Lucky for me I discovered a free solution to get ringtones straight to your iPhone, just follow these steps:

Sure there are plenty of MP3 tagging programs out there. Most of them even check Amazon or Google and fix your tags for you. What sets iEatBrainz apart from the rest is that it actually submits your track to the EatBrainz music database and verifies you have the right song. It does acoustic sound matching so if you have an mp3 cryptically titled 01.mp3, iEatBrainz will figure out its really Black by Pearl Jam and rename it accordingly. Another high quality app by Jay Tuley the author of CD To which I reviewed in my last post.

Ever since I’ve been exposed to the terminal I can’t go back. I found a handy open source app called >CD to…(weird name) which sits in your Finder toolbar. This means you can be browsing some folder directories deep, and when you click on the >CD To… icon it will open up your shell and point you to the directory you are in. Very useful for those Mac users who want to get their hands a little dirty.

I am somewhat of a perfectionist/completionist. I need to have album art, formatted tags, and lyrics for my music collection. Unfortunately you need an iTunes Store Account to automatically grab album art in iTunes which is not right. Corripio is an open-source app for your Mac that does all of this for you with a click of a button. You can go through your entire library and actually EMBED album art, and lyrics into the MP3 itself so if you ever decide to ditch iTunes for another media player you don’t lose all of that hard work. Now when I’m using CoverFlow, I am flipping through actual album covers, not just blank squares ;).

Its been a while since I’ve updated my blog. I’ve been busy with work and playing with the new Mac, but fear not, in the process I’ve discovered a great DVD ripping app called Handbrake. It can rip any DVD you throw at it regardless of protection/encryption or not. You want to preserve the chapters, original quality or export it to your iPod? It can do that too. If you’ve got a dual-core machine expect to rip a full DVD in 10 minutes or less =). As always its open-source and cross platform so you can run it on Windows, OS X or Linux.

I would like to point out that no matter which operating system you may be using, we all have reaped the benefits of open-source. Believe it or not, there is a little bit of free software goodness in all of us:

Windows Users

I’d say browsing the internet is a must these days. Did you know that the TCP/IP stack in Windows is based off of the original code that was licensed by BSD?

Firefox is clearly gaining new ground on Internet Explorer’s turf. The Mozilla Foundation is all about the open-source baby.

Mac users

The entire OS X operating system is based off of the Darwin kernel which, surprise surprise, is a UNIX variant.

KHTML is the engine that renders web-pages in Safari. Yup, another gift given to you by the free software foundation.

Have you ever printed out a report on your Mac? You just used CUPS which is the Common UNIX Printing Service.

Apple has plans to ditch Microsoft and go completely with Open Office in the near future. It just feels better to be using open standards no?

Linux Users

Do you even have to ask? The entire operating system and included applications are all open-source.

The Web

Whenever you visit a website like Digg the content is automatically updated and generated for your viewing pleasure. Chances are its running on the LAMP stack – Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP, check check check and check for open-source.

Google is my best friend. They also run Linux clusters so you get your search results in under a second.

Developers pay attention, Java is the most popular enterprise platform, and Sun just opened up its source for our hacking pleasure.

Whenever you blog on WordPress, or Drupal just know it was built using open source tools, and licensed under the GNU.

When I want information I go to Wikipedia. Wikipedia runs off of the open-source software MediaWiki which is also under the GNU.

Electrical Devices

Intel based computer’s have open source drivers. This means compatibility for everyone.

Set-top boxes like TiVo are using open source software to get you goodness on the big screen. MPlayer anyone?

As you can see open-source is all around us. The points I have mentioned are nowhere near the extent and true caliber of what open source delivers to us on a daily basis. Please enlighten me with your thoughts.